State of the Culture
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But for anyone who's tried to raise children as Christians in the face of a hostile and ubiquitous liberal/progressive media complex, I think it's excusable to feel a bit of satisfaction at hearing someone in that complex complain about a family member being seduced by the right-wing media. One day last week someone posted on Facebook…
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Everyone, I think, including on some suppressed level the participants, recognizes that there is a great deal in the art of the past 70 years or so that is meretricious if not actually fraudulent. Any number of people have pointed this out, but I don't think I've seen a better analysis of the phenomenon than…
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To believe that Darren Wilson was guilty of murder, you have to believe either that a very extensive conspiracy to lie about the evidence exists, or that facts and law are irrelevant when "the community" feels very strongly about something, or both. It looks to me like most of the outrage over the verdict is…
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Coincidentally, in relation to our discussion of the situation of the humanities in contemporary education, this piece on that very subject appears in The New Criterion. It's by Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory. He argues–if I may allow myself an over-simplified summary–that the academics who should be fighting to preserve the place of the humanities,…
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You decide: "I Married Myself"
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Lena Dunham is an actress whose name I recognize, though I have never seen her perform, because she gets into the news now and then. She attracted some attention during the 2012 election for some asinine comments comparing voting for the first time to losing one's virginity to a special someone, with the special guy…
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Youth, as everyone knows who has passed through it some time ago, is the age not of idealism but of self-importance, uncertainty masked by certitude and moral grandiosity untouched by experience of life — or, of course, the age of total insouciance. –Theodore Dalrymple Dalrymple is musing on the dangerous mixture of youth and ideology…
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I wondered the other day whether some novelist had written an alternate-history exploration of what the world would have been like if the French Revolution had not happened. Paul obligingly posted a link to this 1948 story by H. Beam Piper, which you can read or download in various electronic formats at Project Gutenberg. It's…
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England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution. The USA has of course long since been added to this list.…
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Dating Naked contestant sues VH1 after channel 'failed to blur out her crotch' in nude wrestling match Jessie Nizewitz was appearing on VH1 reality programme "Dating Naked" when she stripped off to wrestle her date on a beach. She claims she was promised by producers that her modesty would be "blurred out" when the show aired.…
Light On Dark Water 